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Sociolinguistics from the Periphery "presents a fascinating book about change: shifting political, economic and cultural conditions; ephemeral, sometimes even seasonal, multilingualism; and altered imaginaries for minority and indigenous languages and their users."

Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach presents the firstdetailed comparative analysis of verbal aspect in the Slavic languages.Dickey divides the Slavic languages into two aspectual groups, an easternand a western group as well as a transitional zone between the two. Thisbook shows the semantic meaning of aspect in these groups, analyzed withinthe framework of cognitive grammar. Dickey offers the first comparativeanalysis of Slavic aspect treating more than two languages, and the firstbook-length cognitive linguistic analysis of Slavic aspect.

Dickey establishes seven parameters of variation in aspectual usage:habituality, the simple denotation of past actions, the historical present,stage directions and other instructions, performatives and other cases ofthe coincidence of utterance and action, the imperfective in sequences ofactions, and the derivation of verbal nouns. These parameters are used as abasis for dividing the Slavic languages into the western group of Czech,Slovak, Slovene, Sorbian, the eastern group of Russian, Ukrainian,Belarusian, Bulgarian and the transitional zone of Serbo-Croatian andPolish. Dickey uses concepts from cognitive grammar to construct a semanticanalysis of the category of aspect in each group and in the transitionalzone. Ultimately, Dickey shows that western aspect centers around thecategory of totality, whereas eastern aspect centers around a category oftemporal definiteness.